Even if DEI may be on its way out, the political culture that reigns on campus today remains a threat to the mission of the university.
Even if DEI may be on its way out, the political culture that reigns on campus today remains a threat to the mission of the university.
F or the first time in my lifetime, conservatives seem to have established momentum on American college campuses. The most radical wave of progressivism is receding; the age of DEI is ending.
The recent New York Times story on the DEI debacle at the University of Michigan revealed that the movement has been weakening for over a year. Now, many state flagship universities have wiped DEI from their websites and training. Even my New England liberal-arts college has quietly moved away from DEI.
It has become obvious that DEI, despite its name, does not actually support diversity, equity, or inclusion. It has stifled the most important type of diversity — diversity of thought — in favor of considering a classmate’s intersectionality before his or her merits and personality. And it has sowed discord.
But DEI is only a symptom. So though we may still wonder whether it really is on its way out — for which there is growing evidence — the better question is: Why did it take root in the first place? The answer is found in the often moderate but undoubtedly liberal groupthink present on almost every university campus.
In this light, the decline of DEI is not a conservative victory but a progressive loss. There is a difference. If conservatives and Bari Weiss–style liberals see the collapsing of the DEI movement as “mission accomplished,” universities will continue to reject rigor and embrace orthodoxy.
Liberals invested in a doomed doctrine because they are so secure in their ideological hegemony over higher education. This is not the ideology of the privilege walk or of the land acknowledgment. It’s something less flashy and thus more dangerous: Every person at an American university has implicitly assented to making the Democratic Party platform the platform of the university and the standard for public discourse.
I’ve experienced this soft despotism firsthand. Last year, in my Introduction to American Government class, I received an assignment that asked me to propose “one legal change we as a nation could make today to help work towards a just country,” based on the premise that “systemic racism is pervasive in all of America’s institutions (both public and private).”
Other evidence abounds at Colby College. My fellow government majors will often explain their Democratic partisanship by saying they “believe in basic human rights” — as if Republicans don’t. It should be surprising that this goes unchallenged in classroom settings. But it’s perhaps less of a surprise when more than half of the humanities and social-science classes offered at my college contain obviously lefty buzzwords in their course descriptions. The Colby Spanish Department, for example, does not list teaching Spanish as the chief goal of its curriculum. It aims, rather, to “foster awareness of the power differentials that perpetuate social injustices.”
At Colby, as with many similarly situated institutions, the course-selection process is a minefield. If you tiptoe and weave, it’s possible to find moderate professors who teach serious classes. If you take the right path, it’s possible to escape with a liberal education. That is fundamentally counter to what the university is supposed to do. Serious educational opportunities should be clear and obvious, not accidental and hidden.
Unfortunately, even those serious, nonpartisan classes are not immune to the effects of soft despotism. Students know that there is an indelible, unrelenting tension in the university classroom when someone argues for conservative values — or even for objectivity, for that matter. When conservative students do go against the grain, it is almost always with some qualifier: “I don’t like Trump either, but . . . ” or, “Not to be controversial, but. . . .” Moderate progressivism has become the civil discourse.
Articulate appeals to the nuclear family and free-market capitalism feel more alien than buzzword-laden pontifications about social justice. This is far more Orwellian than the DEI framework. There, progressivism at least showed a kind of courtesy in its unvarnished presentation. Conservatives and old-school Democratic professors have always felt uncomfortable with undiluted ideologues like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin DiAngelo. No similar safeguards exist on campus today against having Hillary Clinton’s talking points tattooed onto our brains.
American universities were and still are — just barely — the envy of the world. But the people who run them are destroying the magic of the quad and the classroom by contorting them into centers for compliance. Education is supposed to liberate us from the cave of prejudice and opinion. It allows us to understand ourselves more fully and prepares us for democratic self-government. This was the mission of the American university.
Now, the products of college education are largely intellectually castrated. Young conservatives and liberals do not know anything about the values system they live by. Many of my peers are wholly unable to construct professionally passable writing, maintain eye contact with their professors, or understand worldviews outside of their own. We are shells of ourselves, somehow by the design of the university. Many of the brightest young minds cannot even finish a book, according to the Atlantic.
My generation of students may increasingly struggle to read. But they excel at claiming victimhood. And they are perfectly fluent in progressive-speak. This is what universities now teach their students. It should be no surprise that this is what they know.
Colleges prize “safe spaces” over intellectual growth. Professors ask students to be agents of change without ever explaining what we are changing. If they do explain, they project progressive and modern lenses onto works that transcend partisanship and time.
Campus conservatives have come to see partisan orthodoxy like taxes: an inevitable nuisance we tolerate to enjoy the benefits of a college education. Moderate liberals do not see the issue with the soft bias prevalent in every classroom. So what, they think, if progressive ideas regularly go unchallenged in class discussions, in school newspapers, and on student-union poster boards? As long as the college itself does not endorse an ultra-progressive policy position, there is no danger to discourse. The students have their opinions, after all. But both the death-and-taxes and ambivalent approach to this issue are quite mistaken.
Many Americans, especially young men, choose a different approach upon becoming aware of the despotism: enter the workforce early rather than pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for partisan indoctrination and alienation. In some ways, the escape from the quad is perfectly rational. But it, too, is mistaken. The stakes are higher than promoting conservatism. This is about saving the university.
The best approach is for students and non-students alike to attempt to restore the mission of the university. Administrators should make their commitment to freedom of speech and inquiry unequivocal. They should adopt the Chicago Statement — the gold standard for discourse on campuses. Reallocate every cent invested in DEI officers to bring the smartest possible people to campus. Have the sharpest Marxist sit down with the brightest conservative. Students will watch them disagree and then shake hands — and they will soon follow suit. After having heard arguments instead of buzzwords, they will read those buzzword-laden course descriptions with renewed interest and suspicion — and wonder whether they are worthwhile.
Professors should realize that the average undergraduate is not as discerning as they are. Our youth and lack of experience lend themselves to rule by the passions. We are predisposed to base partisanship. The job of a professor is not to take us directly from passion to morality but rather to emphasize the intermediary step: the cultivation of reason. Skipping this vital step in favor of teaching a preferred brand of morality produces partisans. Professors should give students the tools to choose well, and trust that they will.
And students should know that college is a time when pursuing our interests is conducive to our freedom. But we will not feel that freedom as vividly as we deserve when we contribute to a declining university culture, one that is ultimately unfriendly to us and to our ability to be free.
Even if DEI may be on its way out, the university cannot become the highest version of itself unless the soft despotism that reigns on campus today is overthrown.